natural resources defense council

How Climate Change Is Making This River Run Backwards

How Climate Change Is Making This River Run Backwards

By Henry Henderson 33,000,000,000. That’s the number of gallons of contaminated Chicago River water that have flowed into Lake Michigan—source of drinking water and quality of life for millions of Americans—in the last decade. The river normally flows away from the lake, so what gives? Blame climate change. And infrastructure not designed or built to […]

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    Why Won’t the EPA Ban This Extremely Toxic Pesticide?

    Why Won’t the EPA Ban This Extremely Toxic Pesticide?

    By Nicole Greenfield The pesticide industry and Dow Chemical have a new reason to cheer. The rest of us appear to be stuck with chlorpyrifos on our food, at least for the time being. On March 29, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt announced the EPA would reverse a proposed ban on this […]

    Ocean Farmers Begin 3-Day Journey to ‘Climate March by Sea’

    Ocean Farmers Begin 3-Day Journey to ‘Climate March by Sea’

    By Jonathan Hahn On President Trump’s first Earth Day in the White House, he declared on Twitter that “we celebrate our beautiful forests, lakes and lands”—an amiable if blasé arm-punch to the planet from the leader of the free world. Until a few hours later that is, when the president resorted to his usual right […]

    Urban Farmer Transforms Community Into Thriving Local Food Haven

    Urban Farmer Transforms Community Into Thriving Local Food Haven

    By Melissa Denchak Most people don’t move to New York City and become farmers. Sheryll Durrant certainly wasn’t planning to when she left Jamaica for Manhattan in 1989. She got her undergraduate degree in business from the City University of New York’s Baruch College and spent the next 20 years in marketing. Then, when the […]

    Cuomo Denies Permit for Northern Access Pipeline

    Cuomo Denies Permit for Northern Access Pipeline

    By Kimberly Ong New York State blocked the Northern Access Project on April 7, a pipeline that would have carried fracked gas from Pennsylvania to Canada via New York. This is a huge victory not just for New Yorkers but for the entire planet. The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC), after a […]

    It’s Official: KFC Goes Drug-Free to Fight Superbug Crisis

    It’s Official: KFC Goes Drug-Free to Fight Superbug Crisis

    By Lena Brook What can America’s most iconic fast-food chicken chain do to fight the growing epidemic of drug-resistant infections? Set a strong antibiotics policy for its chicken supply! More than 70 percent of medically important antibiotics in the U.S. are sold for use on livestock and poultry. And more than 96 percent of those […]

    8 Critical Changes to NAFTA to Prioritize People and Planet

    8 Critical Changes to NAFTA to Prioritize People and Planet

    By Amanda Maxwell and Anthony Swift President Trump has made renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) one of the main goals for his administration and has recently revealed the general plan to do so. As this process moves forward, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), Sierra Club and our partners across a broad […]

    Noise Pollution Forces Whales and Dolphins From Their Homes

    Noise Pollution Forces Whales and Dolphins From Their Homes

    By Jason Bittel Waves lap at motionless heaps of blubber and fins and the sun bears down on chapped skin. Gulls start to, well, do what gulls do. This heartbreaking scene happened in January when nearly 100 false killer whales became stranded along a remote shore in the Florida Everglades. Authorities tried to steer the […]

    EPA Scraps Scheduled Ban of Widely Used Pesticide Known to Harm Kids’ Brains

    EPA Scraps Scheduled Ban of Widely Used Pesticide Known to Harm Kids’ Brains

    In one of his first major decisions as U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator, Scott Pruitt sided with the pesticide lobby over scientists Wednesday in an eleventh-hour decision to abort the agency’s proposal to ban chlorpyrifos—an insecticide that at small doses can harm children’s brains and nervous systems—from use on food crops. Pruitt and the […]